A SCHOOL celebrated the achievements of students past and present with the opening of a new £1.5m classroom development.

CBI director general John Cridland officially opened the new humanities and languages building at Ripon Grammar School ahead of the upper school speech day, at which he was guest speaker.

The new two-storey building, which has been funded by North Yorkshire County Council and was completed on time and on budget, has eight classrooms equipped with the latest touch-screen technology, and a staff room.

The building will be followed next year with an extension to the girls’ boarding house to create 16 new places, and a new £1m dining facility, for which the school is seeking planning approval and funding.

Mr Cridland praised the ambience of the classrooms as a learning environment and said: “The building only liberates the mind, it's only the place where great teachers teach, but it's a step along the journey to world class education.”

The speech day recognised the GCSE and A-level success of students earlier in the summer and welcomed back many of those who left the school for university after their exams.

Mr Cridland told them they needed ambition, self-belief and “a heavy dose of hard work.”

He added: “What I have seen in this fantastic school is rounded education.

“I say one thing to my teenage children that’s drawn from my experience and that is: chase your dreams. Whatever you want to do go for it with all your guts, hard work and ambition and don’t let anybody tell you you can’t achieve it.”

Headmaster Martin Pearman said the A-level students had been an outstanding group with 76 per cent of their grades being A*-B, making Ripon the top performing school in North Yorkshire for the second year running.

Mr Pearman added: “Looking at the current upper sixth, students at RGS are increasingly ambitious, which I think is a tremendous legacy from the year groups that have gone before. Over 30 of this year’s Upper Sixth have applied to Oxbridge, for example.”

Chairman of governors Dr Peter Mason said: “This has been another excellent year for RGS with so much to celebrate.

“If we always seem to be anxious for more, or better, or higher standards, it is not through greed or desire for reputation but an inexhaustible ambition for the best education we can possibly provide for all our students.”